Name: Drive My Car
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Genre: Drama
Released: 2021
Duration: 179 min
Rating: 7.5

Drive My Car (2021) · Cinespective

Meaning, unpacked

Central idea

The film can be read as an exploration of how people try to understand others, and themselves, through performance, language and shared silence. Grief and betrayal remain unresolved until Kafuku learns that honesty about his own failings matters more than solving someone else's mystery.

What it means, and why it matteredKafuku is a man still living with a loss. He takes a theatre job in Hiroshima, staging Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and spends long hours in his red Saab with Misaki, the young woman who drives it. The film's idea is simple and difficult: people try to understand each other, and themselves, through performance, language and shared silence.

What it means

Kafuku is a man still living with a loss. He takes a theatre job in Hiroshima, staging Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and spends long hours in his red Saab with Misaki, the young woman who drives it. The film's idea is simple and difficult: people try to understand each other, and themselves, through performance, language and shared silence.

Grief runs through it. Some questions never get answered, and living with that is the work of mourning. Kafuku hears what he wants to hear and avoids what he already suspects, so when honesty comes, it comes late and costs him. What he learns is that being honest about his own failings matters more than getting an answer. Both he and Misaki carry guilt over people they could not save, and their friendship rests on recognising that without saying it all. Perhaps the quiet lesson is this: you cannot always know another person, but you can sit beside them and keep listening.

Why it mattered

The film began after the wound, not at it. A long prologue sets up the marriage, the stories Kafuku's wife tells and the secret he keeps. Then the title appears, two years pass, and everything reads as aftermath. That gives it the feel of a novel. Eiko Ishibashi's score is sparse, and the sound is mostly voices, engine hum and silence, so the words and the way they are spoken carry the feeling.

It also showed how film and theatre can feed each other. Actors read Chekhov flat, without inflection, for weeks, and truth seems to rise once the acting is stripped away. Hamaguchi uses the same method with his own casts, so the film's style and its subject are one thing. Its Uncle Vanya mixes Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, English and Korean Sign Language, suggesting understanding needs no shared tongue. And it is no plain adaptation of Murakami: Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe borrowed from two other stories and added Chekhov, the Hiroshima festival and much of the second half.

After watching